My Real Name / What’s in a name? To Carol Chehade, playwright, director and trafficking activist, a name is everything. It’s is what people call us, how they identify us and Chehade, who brings her volatile play–a series of interlocking and intersecting monologues to the Cupola Theatre at the Hawai’i Design Center–has many lessons to impart. My Real Name is concerned with what transpires when we are stripped of our names in exchange for appellations such as “bitch” and “whore,” or the spiritual desecration when our bodies are sold on the auction block. My Real Name opens Girl Fest Hawai’i 2008 with the play’s Hawai’i premiere on Friday as a prequel to The New Abolitionists Anti-Sex Trafficking Conference.

Produced by Chehade’s non-profit human rights organization One New Earth, the show’s promotional poster features a teenager in a striped mini sundress splayed on an auction block, staring impassively off into the distance, encircled by three men holding hands. But there is nothing dispassionate about Chehade’s text that hugs the image.

My Name is Assessed. My Name is Auctioned. My Name is Acquired. Now, do you want to know my relegated name or are you finally ready to know my real name? Every minute somebody gets off from this trading block and it is not those who are prostituted.

As the play opens we hear a litany of voices: “My Name is Daddy’s Fantasy. Because of the way I look I got quite a few tricks who wanted to reenact daddy fantasies. That was weird enough, but what was even weirder was when they suddenly want to save a ho–as if I was their daughter.”

My Name is Ghost, My Name is Child. The relentless narratives of horror bleed onto each other. Reaching a climax in their cacophony, before they journey from self-loathing to redemption.

“My Name is Stop!” booms the Miami-born actress Libette Garcia. “Those are the voices I heard for 24 hours! They followed me like stalkers…Do you understand what kind of exorcism I had to go through to finally kill those voices? Stop telling me I’m ugly! I am beautiful. Stop telling me I am fat! I am a voluptuous landscape of heaven. Stop telling me all I’m good for is getting you off!” In her journal, Garcia confesses how she began to play around with a thick Hispanic accent. And how the cast encouraged her. “I felt closer to the women’s stories when I was able to access my own past and history.”

All the survivors wear faces of the dispossessed, the marginalized. However at the denouement, the voices transform from dissonance into a harmonious song. “I first began with 50 survivor interviews,” Chehade said. “I sifted through them. You can smell healing–the bitterness has gone. And there’s a desire to help others. I particularly love working with teenagers who have been oppressed–oppressed is such a difficult word–but I love them for their honesty. We need to go through humility to reach dignity. And for people who have lost everything there is nothing to hide. There they are naked–exposed and vulnerable. That is why my play is difficult to watch. But I don’t believe in shielding my audience. The survivors are not shielded. So why should we be?”

Chehade stitches in the acumen of hip-hop artists such as Tupac Shakur via the voice of AIDS Boy: “Yeah, I am out of the joint but not without a little token. AIDS. I wonder if what Tupac said is true–I wonder if heaven got a ghetto…Crazy how I gotta die to be in a cool place.”

Global cacophony

“For kids in the West Bank–all disenfranchised kids, conscious hip-hop is the voice of resistance,” says Chehade. “I was always an interpreter for both my mother and father. When we first moved to America from Beirut, I felt protective of my Lebanese-born mother.” This ease with the interpretive act, as well as an attentive, curious ear–what Chehade refers to as the gift of the poet–are the amulets that transport to her theater.

Kathy Xian, prominent Honolulu-based activist, filmmaker, arts ambassador and revolutionary admits to the intensity of the rehearsals. She stepped into the formidable task as director in absentum, fortified by frequent conversations with Chehade in Arizona. “It’s been a journey. We as a cast have all become really close. It’s a difficult piece to do. In fact one of the male actors dropped out of the show because of its emotional demands.” Jonathan Larson, a UH student of Cultural and Women’s Studies, echoes this sentiment: “As one of the two male actors, I play some really disgusting roles. I’m glad that the play is brief because it’s challenging to identify with the sexual predator. It’s a method acting nightmare.”

Chehade laughs. “I’ve always had an easier time with female actors. It’s a complex piece for men. At one point I used women dressed up as men. There is the character AIDS Boy who used to live up the street from me in New York City. He died. I have a wonderful actor from Detroit, Jamal, who embodies the spirit of this young man. It was impossible to bring the survivors to Hawai’i so this is the first time I will be presenting the play without the survivors.”

After her initial interviews, Chehade selected the ones that were most compelling to her: “I wanted a multitude of voices. And so I captured the essence of the survivor. At first I would tell the survivor–many of them teenagers sold into trafficking at 9 or 10 years old–just close your eyes and tell me your story. Don’t worry about an explanation.” Chehade would interview them again and again and fill in the holes. She thinks of her journey with the survivors as a collaborative journey: “I could not write without the survivors or the actors. My pen was inked by their blood. Everyone is connected in the process. That is why they call it humanity’s story.”

Xian, in her jeans, tattoos and black boots, directs Troy Apostol, a recent addition to the cast and a mainstay in the Kumu Kahua Theatre repertory. “Do it again,” she says. “You sound too much like a theater person.” My Real Name is political theater dressed in the rawness of agit-prop theater–a theater of the streets–a theater of revolution.

Cupola Theater, Hawai’i Design Center, 1250 Kapi’olani, 2nd Floor, Fri, 11/7, 8:00pm & Wed, 11/12, 3:30pm, $7–$20, [onenewearth.com], [girlfesthawaii.org], 599-3931